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Selfish reasons to want more humans

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Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#201

Post by em-bee »

kiba wrote: post #92
kelnos wrote: post #68

Some of the underlying logic here feels suspect to me. Sure, more people likely leads to more production of non-rival goods, but more people will also make rival goods more scarce and harder to come by. Sure, some rival goods will be replaced by non-rival goods, but it's hard to imagine eliminating them entirely. I don't really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new/better/less-scarce reso…

Matters in the universe is a lot. Ditto the amount of energy. People may argue that unlimited growth is unsustainable, and I agree. But what people don't realize is just...how much resources there is and how much just sits there being wasted by being radiated and hitting inert rocks and gases. The problem is not resource availability(of which they are abundant and uselessly radiating out), or even engineering or econ…

there are so many good comments like this one that are being downvoted without any explanation why. what is wrong with this argument?

there was an article (on HN even i think) some time ago that showed how big of an area of solar panels we would need to place in the sahara desert to solve the worlds energy problems. it was tiny compared to the whole area of the desert. sure, there is still a problem of distribution, but really, this energy problem should be solvable.

the space problem is a bit different. we probably don't want to turn the whole planet into high density housing, even if we could energy wise, but the only thing getting in the way of solving the problems we have is politics as in unwillingness to cooperate for the greater benefit of the world instead of for selfish reasons.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#202

Post by em-bee »

collyw wrote: post #194
em-bee wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't agree with the genetic argument but with your other point. producing geniuses is not a billion dollar industry because we don't yet even know how to teach to that. but that doesn't mean that we could not improve teaching and peoples potential massively. china used to have a billion dollar tutoring industry (ok, i don't know if it was a billion, but china is huge so it's possible) until a change of laws shut i…

It seems fairly obvious that there is a genetic element to intelligence, otherwise animals would be as intelligent as humans.

yes, but this only goes as far as being able to explain the difference between humans and other animals. it doesn't at all explain the differences between different humans because other factors are so strong that so far we have not been able to isolate genetic differences as a factor in human intelligence. even twin studies have been flawed in this regard.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#203

Post by Thiez »

waffleiron wrote: post #152
chr1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before capitalism all of the world was "Third world". And the equity you get without capitalism is everybody being equally poor. And then millions die, like in every attempt to build communism in past century.

I know it’s unfashionable to say on a venture capitalist forum, but millions die under capitalism too.

And in same (many?) cases it's intentional, e.g. by overthrowing governments so the West has cheaper oil, gas, or bananas (Guatemala).

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#204

Post by adastra22 »

throwaway047278 wrote: post #182
adastra22 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More than a billion" is enough to add the -s in English grammar.

As long as we're in the pedantic mode: "More than a billion" could mean from 1 billion up to 1.99 billion. You need at least 2 billions to be able to add the -s The poster you replied to wrote "so yeah probably less than two billions combine", so that actually means you could not use the "-s" ending in this case.

To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.

Which is all rather not the point because that's not what I said. I said "Billions have been lifted out of poverty." The meaning of that statement is: "the count of people who have been lifted out of poverty is measured with the 'billion' unit." That even includes 1 billion, exactly. If I had said "it numbers in the thousands", then 1,000 would have been an acceptable value, as would 9,9999.

But see my other comment. The number of people in India and China who have been lifted out of poverty in the last ~50 years or so is much more than a billion.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#205

Post by scotty79 »

If more people means more geniuses we should be getting new groundbreaking insights about fundamental physics every year.

We don't because the resource of human learnable undiscovered physics was kind of limited resource that kinda ran out.

In the spirit of the article we replaced one resource with another. So now most of our numerous geniuses instead of discovering how to steal more from the universe learn how to steal more from consumers in investment banks, marketing companies and tech giants.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#206

Post by moravak1984 »

gherkinnn wrote: post #197
darth_avocado wrote: post #41

The population already exists. But we don’t see that many geniuses working on ambitious projects because they are working minimum wage jobs or wasting away without education in Africa, India, China, or downtown LA. We don’t have a population problem, just a utilization problem.

And in other parts of the world, geniuses are found, educated, only to waste away optimising ads on websites.

Oh, this is such a cliché, like all contemporary geniuses do is maximizing CTR...

Many others are doing R&D for companies producing harmful products (both for humans and the environment, even when they love to make people think they are not eco-unfriendly (looking at you, Elmo Musk)), figuring out how to "maximize profitability", even if said profitability comes from pushing people into debt, or simply keeping silent and inactive on meetings where very harmful decisions are made.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#207

Post by dragonwriter »

adastra22 wrote: post #204
throwaway047278 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we're in the pedantic mode: "More than a billion" could mean from 1 billion up to 1.99 billion. You need at least 2 billions to be able to add the -s The poster you replied to wrote "so yeah probably less than two billions combine", so that actually means you could not use the "-s" ending in this case.

To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s. Which is all rather not the point because that's not what I said. I said "Billions have been lifted out of poverty." The meaning of that statement is: "the count of people who have been lifted out of poverty is measured with the 'billion' unit." That even includes 1 billion…

> To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.

To be pedantic, “billions” is used without a specific number as a general measure of broad scale, but with any specific number, it is just “billion”, not “billions”. “billions of dollars” is fine, but “1.0000000001 billion” or “2 billion” or “999.999999999 billion”; none of the last three take an “s” at the end.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#208

Post by croes »

>More geniuses First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions.

>If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all.

The same is valid for psychopaths and other bad people.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#209

Post by archargelod »

I think we could apply Brook's law[0] here. "Throw more scientists/engineers at the problem" doesn't mean that problem will be solved faster.

Moreover, he assumes that increasing number of people will result in higher number of geniuses, but "Correlation does not imply causation".

Ok, even if we assume, that number of exceptionally smart humans will increase. We have limited resources of our planet and industries. Having even more people will most likely lower the average standard of living. Wouldn't it be harder to find those geniuses if most of the population are homeless, drug addicts and living in slums?

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#210

Post by cbare »

I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.
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